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Four myths that won’t land you the job

You’ve been lied to, bamboozled, misled and fooled by the people you are closest to. Your well-meaning parents, friends, and even your spouses have led you down the path to perpetual unemployment.

Everyone, right or wrong, wants to give you their opinion of the best way to land a job. These are some you should ignore:

1. Keep applying

For different jobs, yes. For the same job, no. Appyling over and over may have actually been a good idea at some point, before electronic applications became widely used. Paper applications are easily misplaced, or lost in a big stack, but that’s not the case anymore.

Over time, the paper application has been phased out and replaced by electronic applications. Sometimes these are emailed directly to hiring managers. Sometimes they’re sorted and stored by sophisticated software called an Applicant Tracking System. This system allow employers to keep applications on file, where they can be easily retrieved and reviewed. There’s no need to apply more than once every 90 days or so, and in many cases you won’t be able to. It is more likely to annoy a hiring manager than show persistence.

2. Employers never check your history

This just flat out isn’t true. Employers are willing to spend the big bucks on hiring the right people, and they do. Background checking is a nearly $1 billion dollar per year industry, and that doesn’t include drug, credit and reference checks.

If the prospect of a background check concerns you, the best thing you can do for yourself is be honest. 80 percent of employers will check your background in some way, so lying will only get you caught during the interview process, or fired if you somehow make it through.